Keep your website online during Black Friday

Black Friday website traffic for 2016 is expected to be greater than ever, with so many retailers last year under estimating online buyers we witnessed a number of retailer with incredible offers and frustrated potential buyers unable to take advantage due to technical issues.

When promoting your website to drive all this incredible traffic, it’s highly likely that your strategy will spread beyond just SEO and link building alone into an omni channel digital marketing strategy that includes social media.

In 2005 social media usage was used by about 5% of Americans, in 2019 it’s around the 69% mark and continuing to grow.

When using social media as part of your black Friday strategy its important to be aware of social media statistics – As these can greatly benefit your campaign when taken into account.

 

Below are 3 ways to keep your website online during the black Friday sales:

#1 Speak with your webhost – Ask them firstly if they have a system in place that will detect a spike in traffic and handle it accordingly. With cloud web hosting you can typically scale on demand as your traffic spikes thus avoiding any down time.

Be sure to ask your web host about the technical side of receiving a high volume of traffic, are there any small errors showing in your error logs that could magnify as the traffic to your website spikes?

Are there any coding issues? Your webhost will know from the web logs, but things such as open queries can cause massive issues and cause your website to die as you traffic grows and the server resources aren’t in place.

 

#2 Optimise your website for speed – Ask your webhost to enable server side caching so that images and code loads quicker.

Use www.gtmetrix.com to highlight issues with your website that you may not be aware of. GTMetrix will point out ways to improve your load time, your server response time and ways to optimise your overall website including code, 3rd party code and large images.

Note – Use the section called waterfall to find out what’s taking the longest to use and optimise it to reduce your load time. Ideally you want to aim for a load time of around 3-3.5 seconds.

Also remember it is important to optimise for speed not just on your desktop but mobile due to the high number of mobile traffic expected this year.

If you have a WordPress website, then there are 21 things you can do to speed up your WordPress website speed.

 

#3 Be mobile ready! – Our free Black Friday Mobile Health Check will help you dial this in. But check and check again, ask family members, of if you can’t then use www.fivesecondtest.com, set people tasks on your mobile website to see if they can accomplish them quickly and without help, can they check out with minimal fuss? If they can’t then contact us to discuss your FREE Black Friday Website Health Check.

Your chosen web design agency should be offering you a website maintenance package that can help prepare you for Black Friday.

Be sure to sit down well in advance of Black Friday with your design agency and ensure that you cover all the basis and take the necessary precautions to ensure your website maintenance is up to speed and that your website stays online during this typically busy period.

 

This article is part of our Black Friday Special series:

#1 Black Friday Sales, marketing & advertising Ideas

#2 Free Black Friday Website Health Check

#3 Keep your website online during Black Friday